The idea that the 1990s were a lost decade for B.C., 10 years of economic rack and ruin under the NDP, has been a constant theme in Liberal attacks.

As the campaigning intensifies in advance of the May 2013 general election, the pitch now is that British Columbians can’t afford to let a new NDP government take us back to that dismal decade.

But a different storyline has now been delivered by a surprising source, the Business Council of British Columbia. An economic review that looks at the ‘80s under Social Credit, the ‘90s under the NDP, and the first decade of the 21st century under the Liberals produced a blizzard of statistics that will no doubt be interpreted differently by the Liberals and New Democrats.

Only the most blinkered, partisan review, however, could conclude that the ‘90s were fundamentally worse than the ‘80s or even the decade after Liberal leader Gordon Campbell swept to power in 2001.

The statistical review shows that the ‘90s were high growth relative to the decades on either side. The economy grew faster, jobs were created at a higher rate and exports grew faster than in either the ‘80s or ‘00s.

I’m cherry-picking these aspects just as I’m sure politicians will do when they tell their version. The actual picture is more complicated and open to interpretation. But while arguments will rage over the net effects, there is no sign of a lost decade.

The growth of the economy in the ‘90s was driven in part by population growth. The average GDP growth was higher at 2.72 per cent per year in the ‘90s than in the ‘80s at 2.12 per cent or the ‘00s at 2.36 per cent. However, the growth per capita, each individual’s share of the growth, was higher under the Liberals at 1.2 per cent compared to just .65 per cent under the NDP.

The growing population may also have been primarily responsible for the high rate of job growth in the ‘90s. The unemployment rate was lower under the Liberals, but it was also falling across the rest of the country.

One of the political questions out of all of this will be how much the government of the day was responsible for what did or did not happen.

The business council economists do compare how B.C. performed versus the rest of the country. On that basis, even though growth was slower under the Liberals than under the NDP, B.C. was outpacing the rest of the country. In the ‘90s, a period of high growth in Canada and the U.S., B.C. was falling slowly behind.

While the Liberal spin on that is that the NDP took the shine off what should have been a decade of stellar growth, there were other factors at play then just as there are now. The forest industry in B.C. was continuing a decline that began a decade earlier. Commodity prices were down and the economies with which we are being compared were booming.

The Liberals benefited from a commodity boom, while manufacturing declined in the east.

What the NDP may find it most difficult to explain is the record on real per capita income growth, as measured before taxes. While we’ve been falling behind the rest of the country in each of the past three decades, real per capita income didn’t just grow slowly in the ‘90s, it fell slightly.

But in investment growth in machinery and equipment — an area that based on their rhetoric I would have expected the Liberals to do vastly better than the New Democrats — the pace has fallen under the Liberals.

None of this is proof that the NDP did a better job than the Liberals or vice versa. As the business council economists caution in the introduction to their report, B.C. is a small market and the province’s well-being is influenced as much by external factors, such as commodity prices or the value of the loonie, as it is by government policies here.

That’s not to say the government doesn’t matter to the economy. It’s just that the difference it can make isn’t as great as both Liberals and New Democrats will try to persuade us it is as they try to win our vote.

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Craig McInnes: Numbers undermine notion of NDP’s dismal decade

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